Cat's Cradle

For ten thousand years the cat had lain asleep. Now it stretched out, its skinless bones clicking and popping. Those pops echoed across galaxies and worlds shuddered to hear it. The cat licked its paws, a process that took years, as it laboriously dragged its limbs across the cosmos. It was nestled within the comforting embrace of a nebula, a warm cocoon of forming stars that bounced off the cat and collided each other. Snooker on the scale of solar systems.

A hand reached down and stroked the cat's black fur. It shivered in pleasure and curled itself around the leg of the deity. The leg was sheathed in dark matter, a pair of impossible trousers, a source of energy that the cat soaked up eagerly.

“Come, mine pet,” said the deity. It had no voice, and instead its speech vibrated across the fabric of space and time. The cat heard it, and so would nearby worlds, but they would comprehend it as something as mundane as gravity, or cosmic radiation, or magnetic flux. The speech might knock a few orbits out of alignment but on this scale, it didn’t matter.

The cat meowed in response. Time slowed when it did.

With a step, the deity crossed three universes, the cat still clinging on. As they passed from one space to another, the cat’s fur changed from black to purple, then to a crackling brown substance that an observer might think were dead leaves or bits of cardboard, but which was neither. The cat was no longer a cat, but it was easiest to think of it as one.

This universe was smaller. It had only three worlds and no stars. One was the cat’s homeland, a misshapen globule of glittering green rock. It was millions of times bigger than Earth, whose creatures the cat most resembled, and rocketed around the outer limits of this universe like a centrifuge. The second planet, in compensation, was tiny. Two metres across, it hung at the very centre of the universe and was made from the purest crystal. At its heart was entombed a female figure, a black silhouette even darker than the space around it. In other times, the deity would head straight for this planet, to stand for eons watching over it, but it had other things to do. The cat felt fear and excitement compete through the leg it was curled around. The final planet was zig-zagging around, a pearl of pure white that was defying any understandable laws of physics if they’d ever existed in this universe. At one moment it looked huge, at other tiny. It changed its path randomly, without logic. It was chaos, all wrapped up in a ball. The cat looked away.

Unerringly, the deity reached out and snatched up the ball of chaos with a hand that was all things at once. The cat hissed and its coat stood on end as it felt the power of the planet. The deity sighed and the cat flicked its ears forward.

“She is not coming back,” said the deity. Part of the universe cracked at the words and nothingness leaked through. The deity fixed the leak with a flick of its infinite eyes.

The cat had known this for a long time. It understood death unlike the deity ever could. Millions of years spent hunting and being hunted on its home planet before befriending the deity had taught it that. The deity did not know death. But now it might.

With a blink, the crystal planet was in front of them. The deity held up the chaos planet beside it. Reality shrieked and a thousand universes died at its actions, but the deity held firm. The crystal planet vibrated and glowed with an energy that was not heat. The cat fled from its perch around the deity’s ankle and cowered in the furthest reach of space.

“I cannot bring her back,” said the deity, and it cried. Stars cascaded down its cheeks and the universe was filled with the new light of a thousand suns, a tragic chandelier that whirled in orbit around the deity.

The cat understood this also. The deity could create all things, except for her. For she was a deity also, the twin of the other. Both birthed from nothingness, but one formed properly, all powerful. The other, a formless runt of escaping energy, a parasite who’d clung to the essence of the true deity. The deity had formed a shell for its emaciated twin, its first action of creation. A template it would copy over and over again across millions of universes. But a reality was not meant for two deities. Her (for the act of creating a body had confined the weaker deity to such concepts) power could not be sustained. All energy returned to the deity. Inevitable, she had died, killed by the deity’s own omniscience. The cat had not known this at first, but it had learned.

“I must send her away,” aid the deity, and the cat yowled. The deity reached out and reopened the tear in reality. Nothingness seeped in, leaving burns where it touched the essence of the deity. It did not flinch, however, and held out both the crystal tombs and the planted of chaos.

Power happened then, which the cat did not understand. Every colour, imaginable and unimaginable, flashed across the universe, a ruthless strobe of harsh light. Every universe rattled and five different planets of humankind were able to discover time travel.

Amongst it all, the cat was grasped by the deity in a tender embrace.

“You must go with her,” he said, soothingly. “For when she awakes, she will need a friend.”

“What about you,” said the cat, in its own version of a voice.

The deity indicated the countless universes around them. “I have all the friends I need. I will remember you always but do this thing for me.”

So the cat nodded. It looked over the deity’s shoulder to see that it had created a vessel of perfect energy, every force in the universe bound together in a seamless bubble. A hatch made from black holes hung open at its sides. Within, the crystal planet rotated sweetly. The deity carried the cat over and placed it carefully within the vessel. The deity was still crying and the cat cried too.

“Farewell,” they both said in unison, and the deity used the tearful suns to seal the hatch in place. Then, with a scream of hopeful excitement, it pushed the vessel through the tear of reality and into the nothingness beyond.

The cat slept again. It did not know for how long, for time did not exist in this place. But when it awoke, they were in a different place. A woman hung in stasis beside it. For a moment, the cat was confused. Then it felt the reality around it with a flick of the tongue. They floated in a tiny pocket universe, so small it could touch both sides with tail and nose at once. Its flicking tongue told it many things. The most important of these was that this was a different reality from the one it had been in. A fresh place within the nothingness where the deity’s power would not compete with its twin. A fresh place for the weaker twin to craft its own multiverse and shape its own reality. A fresh life for this life to prosper where it couldn’t before.

The cat moved closer to the new deity, still confined to her body. It saw colour returning to her cheeks, and a faint twitch of limbs as technicolour blood began pumping. It could sense the essence flowing into her from the reality around them, but it would be long time yet before she would awake.

Purring, the cat curled itself around the cold body in a protective cacoon, and dreamed of its old friend.